“We were actively having this Spotify battle,” she said. The two of them started fighting over the account as if they were grappling for sole authority over the remote control. And her hacker - whom she imagined as “some Russian guy in his car,” though he listened through a web browser and nothing explicitly indicated that he was a man - got more aggressive. She deleted the playlist, but every couple of days it would come back. Margaret Harris, a 23-year-old Toronto resident, realized she had been hacked over the summer when she found a playlist of EDM with song titles in what looked like Cyrillic characters. Ball to apathy, other victims of hacking have come up with ingenious ways to drive their hackers out. When she got home, she looked on her laptop and found her hacker was listening to a playlist of “sad trap music” on a device named Sophia’s iPhone. She was in the car listening to either Christmas music or Taylor Swift (she couldn’t recall which), when there was an interruption. Coughlin, 36 and an advertising executive in Cleveland, was hacked on Saturday. “I assumed it was like some sad teenager going through a breakup, listening to bad music,” said Charlene Coughlin of her hacker. When a Spotify account gets hacked, the hackee is able to see the music the hacker has chosen (either on the hacker’s device, or sometimes, presumably by accident, on the hackee’s). That seems to be less true when it comes to music. Usually, one doesn’t think about one’s hacker too often.

The company said in a statement that it takes “all fraudulent activity on our service extremely seriously” and recommended that its users protect themselves by refraining from using the same user names and passwords across various accounts.) These digital incursions can be unsettling (when not outright upsetting), but they’re often impersonal.

(For the record, here’s what Spotify suggests victims of hacking should do.

Spotify login email spam